Now Jacob Coxey, who marched an army of unemployed on Washington in 1894 and who had tea with Margaret who interviewed him in Ohio on her way home from the West, believed in his cohort-populist-financial-theological windbag Carl Browne’s theory of reincarnation. At death the soul returned to a reservoir like a caldron which contained all previous souls and this reservoir was where you got your soul and its special mix when you were born (as, from the Earth, your bodily chemicals), and Christ’s soul was in that caldron too, and therefore, in the fractional reincarnation which soulhood was, you had some Christ in you, but Browne discovered he and Jacob Coxey had an exceptionally large ration of Christ’s soul (presumably not embezzled in those panic months of defalcations by the dozen) which explained why the two men had been brought together for good works and for the march on Washington commencing at Easter of ‘94 (by which time Margaret and Alexander were reunited in New Jersey and making their own plans) and Browne called Coxey the cerebrum of Christ and himself the cerebellum. But the Hermit-Inventor had nothing to do with religious or social questions.
But . . . but . . . (the boy who at fifteen felt like a man asked his grandfather Alexander, who raised his palm in the peace gesture and laughed, Don’t ask me, don’t ask me), but didn’t the Hermit-Inventor of New York say the Navajo Prince’s mother would come back to life if the East Far Eastern Princess let herself be turned into a mist and spirited into the great Statue in the aging harbor?—Don’t ask me, laughed the grandfather, I thought you were through with all that stuff, so that Jim saw Alexander with meaty hands and bloody festoons reflected in his eyeglasses, because the awesomely pale-faced butcher with his Panama hat downtown had a sign behind him saying, DON’T ASK ME. I DON’T KNOW AND I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. But did that mean the Hermit knew the Prince’s mother would recover? But how long was it before she actually did come back to life? Wasn’t it that very night that they left? Or did the Princess’s promise to let herself be turned into a mist later on make the mother well again? Did the Hermit actually make it happen or only know that it would?
Oh, said Alexander, I think most of their ceremonials are against disease (can’t blame ‘em) whereas down among the Zuhis most of the palaver and singing is aimed at making rain, I think—your musical mother wasn’t the slightest bit interested in all that—but don’t ask me, ask your grandmother: Think what stems from not asking a given question ("given"? who gave it?). Think what would have happened if Jackson had asked the Indians what they wanted. The Civil War might have been averted and U. S. Grant would never have had the chance as President to fill the Indian Agency with Quakers who often actually did find out what the Indians wanted. (How could the Civil War have been averted? the boy started to ask, but his elder was perhaps way ahead of him.) For one thing, Indians westward might not have been so bad off and Margaret might not have been so curious to see what we had done to the Indians, and how—because you know she met a nasty little chap, part-Sioux I guess, at the Chicago Fair who told her the Indians deserved the Long March and had a perfect right to their poverty with their dumb ways of farming and if the magic was so all-fired powerful why did they not make rain? A man named Wentzel or Hintz or Lenz, the name doesn’t matter—and that’s why she got mad and disobeyed her father whom she was sending news dispatches back to, and went on out to Indian territory, still sent her dispatches mind you, wore her hat clear to Colorado, courageous girl, Margaret, but . . . but . . .
What? asked the grandson, who had once asked Margaret how she had gotten back to New Jersey from the West and she said she had had enough money to get to St. Louis where a collateral, thoroughly disreputable cousin of the Eads family whom she had met months before at the New Jersey exposition at the Chicago Fair helped her out—he drank too much and had been a friend of Gustave ("Le Tour") Eiffel in the French countryside where they had studied trees and computed bridges—and this man had gotten Margaret onto a train east, he was owed a favor by a railroad man, a German immigrant who had supplemented the meager pay of two Democratic coun-cilmen but made more money faster across the river in the East St. Louis mule market just before the famed windy flood of ‘85, and both men were now obsessed with putting together a World’s Fair for St. Louis within ten years to top Chicago’s, one already writing a book about it; but Margaret fell out with the conductor of the train somewhere past Cincinnati and made the rest of the trip under her own steam.
Ran out of money in the dead of winter, wound up in Massillon, Ohio, taken into his home in nearby village of Millport for the night by Jacob Coxey who was then planning his Easter march of the unemployed on Washington and whom she liked up to but not including his adopted theory of reincarnation; and much later at home in Jersey she wrote two humorous accounts of the Great Unknown:
the day before Palm Sunday a mysterious stranger appeared near Massillon to participate in Coxey’s "Commonweal" march, one "Louis Smith," a big well-dressed man who seemed the best-informed man there. He disciplined the "Commonweal" marchers and taught them to drill and salute officers. A Secret Service man on the march was also unable to find out who the Great Unknown was.
When Coxey’s March reached East Palestine, Pennsylvania, it received a chilly welcome. But it was at East Palestine that the Unknown proposed a system of publicly owned farms on which the unemployed might work under military discipline for the benefit of the State.
At Columbiana, a boy recognized the Great Unknown (or, Unknown Smith) as the ringmaster of a circus that had visited the town three years before.
Jim asked what Margaret recalled his mother saying and she said, "Oh, some severe thing about Chopin being better than Schumann, though she loved his wife." But his grandfather, who never went anyplace, had always until now seemed a source of certain knowledge. This day on the porch, the boy thought: They’re married. And it was not the marriage of his own, now halved, parents.
Anyway, Alexander went on, it was an accident that she went out there to start with, and if she hadn’t gone out there, she wouldn’t have had to come back. (He chuckled.)
Was Gramma in love with someone out there? asked Jim, who was a man already and a romantic who could take at some moments of softened and recompounded time a year stroking Anne-Marie Vandevere’s fingers in the treed darkness of the cemetery driveway at one in the morning (in the borrowed pickup truck, of course) and never wonder that she let him—
Oh it was back here too, said Alexander abruptly. And after a minute or two he retired from the porch, half as if for the bathroom, half as if for the "radio room," and Jim wondered if it was true what he had heard Alexander once say to Jim’s mother, that all too often one knew a woman through a man, through her husband or her brother or her father; for he now heard Margaret on the long-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock at news about—as he had already heard downtown—three piner babes living or dead out by Lake Rompanemus swamps. (Oh, the Indians took all the best names before we got here, she had told him. Well, they was here first, the boy had heard himself say.)
All things being equal, it was up to him, to Jim, to decide about things, about people. So that, responsible as he mysteriously was for anything or everything—including his exit as soon as possible after high school graduation from this town which contained these stories but not him—he would find an outside sanction to go away in the command of his mother whose own example he was swollen with and yet could set apart, that is of leaving him first: which were, whatever their dark or convergent, (or non-) connection, undeniable facts that would not go away, though he would rather make his getaway without seeking information, rather take a sea voyage—yay, sea voyage!—even a Coast Guard weather patrol, the ship was not at all the mere tinder bomb that war films Saturday afternoons and Saturday nights made you think ships basically were, where explosives all this time were what he knew he should study, namely the explosives that science was coming up with along with a glassless beer bottle. Yet this glassless beer bottle might be explained several ways and absorb all the explanatio
ns—might be an electric field, or a plastic substitute, or an inventive description of a bottle served without a glass. The last inspired by the presence some very late afternoons in the early sixties of a sleazily momentum’d collaterally professional slew-handed, sometime information dealer who sat at the end of the bar of a Washington hotel like a western visitor hoping to be mistaken for something—as if to overhear what Jim Mayn and a colleague (say friend) or two might be discussing. And once there he was, taking an interest not in some fact of Mayn’s past that was small-talk till it entered this perpetual one of Nature’s eavesdroppers’ ears to glint then left-handedly in his sickeningly interested eyes, but in a curious left-handed discovery, through near-disaster, of Jim Mayn as accidental scientist —not that his formula, framed at a moment when the pilot of his light charter plane making a descent for a landing lost "lift" and stalled them into the briefest of dives, would change the history of wind, and the formula had in any event already been arrived at independently of Mayn.
Nor was it much of a formula—kinetic power of wind equals (but here he didn’t know how he had arrived at) mass (which he had seldom understood) times windspeed squared, except that the turbulence layer their small-businessman’s Cessna hit was so like a landing strip undergoing an earthquake and thick enough to immerse the plane, disintegrating the smooth flow of air the plane’s elevator surfaces were plotted to play and be played by, grasp and be grasped, that this frictional boundary with a life of its own (though made provenly real by the presence of this light aircraft) seemed to multiply wind by wind, like some airs don’t mix, to make the energy splashed in among the controls some personal spirit he had been waiting for to make of him a conclusion; but the rollercoaster leveled and the pilot called back to him, Are you still there?, laughing as they got down to fifty feet above the tarmac when the wings went—no, God they fluttered vividly, and the plane, in a scale of motion so slow they had all week to watch, flipped one "arm" half-over so that Mayn, within the body of the plane whose wing this was, bruised his rib cage, daring the vehicle to go right over upside down to prove (extra-vehic-ularly) the difference between flying and landing. But their descent to touchdown jibed exactly with the roll-back into level so that the Earth, which was after all, Mayn saw for the first time, always one prime boundary to winds, seemed to draw them toward its magnet against the double whirl-wake that had been crazily waiting two or three minutes for them in the absence of the airliner that had started them spinning and departed; and he knew he had a grinning formula for this too—what the pilot not so casually stammered was turbulence tunnels caused by wing-tip vortices that kept whirling sometimes for several minutes—"Can you believe it?" the pilot called—"Sure, now that I’ve had my frontal lobotomy!" his occasionally suicidal passenger said unwarily and so enjoyed his remark that he let himself for the hundredth time fall short of the Anasazi’s high standards of non-repetitive conversation and possibly silence (the line between which one might be moved by yet never understand): lost, however, on Spence in his leather fringes at the curving end of the monumentally lengthy bar but who upon hearing the name of airline correctly identified the time of Mayn’s landing (was Spence lookin’ out the back window?) as being that of his own departure from the same surface on that very commercial carrier whose turbulent wake spinning air off its wingtips had doubled and redoubled the hazard for Mayn’s small plane returning from a business powwow with three sewage-disposal companies in Delaware on a day marked by a band of clouds with some embedded showers and thunderstorms.
Spence then fell so silent he was actually a moment later not there, no doubt calling long-distance from all the lobby pay phones at once; but he returned with his beer to inquire if Mayn was still interested in NASA’s "overt weather operations" (joke). Mayn’s nod was not curt cordiality. How do you nod to a worm? (Now a snake ... a cobra that can carry a tune und reise to an occasion!)
"Ah was on thet plane," Spence mimicked; "ah was on mah way ta Arizone."
The men didn’t give a hoot; Mayn heard Spence murmur names of other western states—"made a fire out of mesquite roots middle of nowhere forty-eight hours ago, small business conference, might’s well a been blindfolded, in the middle of some desert, man named Santee Sioux—ever been on a forty-eight-hour pass, Mayn?"—which sounded like "Ever know a man named . . . ?"
"You know damn well I’ve been on a forty-eight-hour pass!" but Mayn had never told Spence such a thing, and Mayn’s words told both of them that Spence had an interest in Mayn but it was probably no news because some years previous—the eve of the U-2 press conference when we learned how we had sown the atmosphere known as Russia’s airspace and they in turn had seeded our seeding so that a pilot named Powers was precipitated from the issue of whose weather it was that NASA was examining—Mayn had been restrained by his friend Ted, the skinny, obnoxious Spence would defend himself with a weapon you felt sure.
Why—spor-quoia—did it stick in his head or his grandmother’s (who would get to the point at once if he demanded it but showed her care for him by making him, like his living life, wait for the upshot of a tale maybe somewhat like his brain, maybe a tale that proved always to get into tangles that emerged as having started earlier though he hadn’t seen it, so he knew she had loved having him in the palm of her hand. This wasn’t at all like teaching him to whistle while they lay in bed when he was six years old, and you do it or you don’t, you summon the exact wind and supple crevice for it and then of all things forget what you’re doing in order to do it, but—)
Why did what stick? Why, this long-lived, half-dead couple of guys: do we mean . . . ? Yes; the Anasazi (semi-retired) medicine man (who was uniquely invulnerable to reincarnation) and the Hermit-Inventor who seems to have existed in three manifestations at least (the great great uncle three decades before the meeting with the girl Margaret in ‘85 "at" the Statue of Liberty (if you call those scattered large-scale units one statue) and then much later in the mid-twentieth of centuries an unfrocked weather thinker who lived almost as remotely in his own drab Greenwich Village street as he did in the lost feelings of a man called Mayn who would inexplicably imagine not primarily what this old specialist geezer had gone through but the galaxies of people who had known him and looked at him—to which we have to add the immediate, more amused and optimistic, yet shorter feelings of a woman on the street named Grace Kimball, star-quality possessor of a bicycle, great giver of instructions and sympathy to other women—who saw the most recent manifestation of (unbeknownst to her) the Hermit across the street one day escorting an old lady both beautiful and baffled, entertained and confused (in this loosely articulated Manhattan capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale lives) but if confused, also beyond transition.
Now, the Anasazi medicine man lived high up in a honeycombed cliff because his ancient people, of whom he was the ultimate survivor by centuries, had traditionally inhabited such apartment structures or multiple dwellings; but his real reason was that, given the name of Changing Grandchild after one of the four mythic or directional sons, he had been unable himself to "change" for a good part of his life, sitting in his desert basement as a distinguished adolescent thinker, maintaining for over a century an alarming reputation as a healer of seductive tranquilizing powers (who could have foreseen but, by self-definition, not reincarnate in a Presque Isle, Maine, obstetrician long after to whom many-times-miscarried woman traveled hundreds of miles to receive his magic) and when the Anasazi had changed his life during his second century, he chose to live high-celled and inaccessible in the canyon wall. He betrayed strange likenesses: between his noctilucent teeth and gums and the specialist Mena’s javelina-like lips; also between (a) his capacity to recreate outside him, from their origins in his bodily organs and circulatory precipitations and heart-light, such weather phenomena as warm sleet (whence?) or the fan of shadow-rays across the pre-sunrise sky, and (b) the capacity in his friend the Hermit of New York to take such phenomena from outside inside—to "internalize" t
hem, we already remember saying in a later language—and explain them in the poetry of science; also, the penetrating humor in the Anasazi’s stark, light, truth-reflecting or -inventing voice seemed a less dense otherwise identical imprint of the Navajo Prince’s, for instance on the day when the Anasazi yielded him the pistol which had belonged to the Thunder Dreamer (the very day when the Prince’s mother refused to consult the Anasazi about the aperture in her head which a voice on the winds of a storm seeming to be the voice of the healer himself had ascribed to weather of foreign origin falling into a mountain in the vicinity precipitating forces like weather then falling "out" of the mountain to target selected human receptors). The likenesses aforementioned hinted to Margaret and her grandson that the Anasazi’s future non-reincarnality had been made up for by some simultaneous dispersion of his being among his contemporaries. Jim did not think it through at fifteen, though always knew that he was not scheduled for reincarnation. Enough could happen in this life. Enough for what? for whom? But when, years later, at the end of a night on a Bermuda beach with his wife, Jim saw shadow-rays over the ocean knowing they were not really fanned out but parallel and they shot out from an irregular horizon profile of tradewind cumulus, this he remembered was pretty much what Margaret had said the vacationing colleague from the East had told the Anasazi, who had seen the phenomenon though never the ocean except the ocean of the desert, and the Anasazi had been glad for once to agree because what had emanated from him via the back of the eyeball observing the confluence of seas, mountains, irrigation ditches, and the crepuscular cactuses that while you’re not looking fly away (in exactly as threatening a manner as the prehistoric Texas pterodactyls with thirty-five-foot wingspread flew at their prey), had reappeared in the Hermit-Inventor’s science refreshed in its turn by each summer’s breather westward.
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